It said “in years to come we’ll either be saying ‘remember when Tamsin did that silly little JumpProof thing’, or ‘remember when it all fit in that one small room’.”
Nobody knows which way it goes. I’ve spent a decade coaching executives and founders through uncertainty and change, and for two years JumpProof sat in my head going nowhere. The irony was not lost on me.
JumpProof makes absorbent activewear for women who experience bladder leakage during exercise. It may surprise you that it’s one in three of us, because almost none of us talk about it. We just modify our lives around it, skipping the trampoline, avoiding the long run, and wearing dark colours just in case.
I wanted to build something that meant women didn’t have to, while looking and feeling like nothing but their favourite pair. Three years ago I woke up with the idea and the name, fully formed.
I registered JumpProof before breakfast, and then I did very little with it for a long time.
The year prior, I was working with Sophie, a physio with a product idea and real potential behind it.
Instead of launching, Sophie bought courses. Fifteen of them. Shopify, TikTok, product photography, Meta ads, copywriting. She’d spent thousands and hadn’t actually done anything. When she came to me for coaching I suspected I was about to become course number 16.
I asked what would happen if she launched tomorrow, and she winced. “I can’t. I don’t know how to do Facebook ads. No-one will see it.”
“What if you didn’t run ads?” “How would anyone find it?” “What if you just told 10 people you know?”
Pause.
“That’s not how you’re supposed to launch a business.”
“Says who?”
“Every course I’ve bought.”
The avoidance can feel like self-sabotage, but it’s actually self-protection.
Ayelet Fishbach’s research shows that high performers often return to areas where they already feel competent, even when those areas are no longer moving them forward. Preparation feels productive. It keeps the dream, and your sense of self, safe.
I knew exactly how to help Sophie through this.
What I had to reckon with was that I was now doing the same thing.
The first step in the Experiment Mindset isn’t action, it’s diagnosing where you’re actually stuck. Behaviour change has three levers: Environment, Psychology and Physiology. Most people try to mindset their way through everything. For me, the answer wasn’t mindset at all. It was Environment. Specifically, people.
I was at a workshop in Brisbane and across the room was someone I’d been following online. She’d just launched two very clever product brands, and I built up the courage to go and speak to her.
I told her about JumpProof and admitted I was finding manufacturing hard to navigate with no experience. She offered to chat, fell in love with the idea, and came on as my business partner. One conversation was the lever that moved two years of stop-start.
We worked through five manufacturers and narrowed it down to one. Then came the prototypes, and countless iterations of tweaks so small nobody else would notice but that felt enormously important to us.
I wasn’t launching anything I wasn’t ready to shout from the rooftops about. Then came the scary bit, putting it out into the wild and getting real feedback. There’s no comfortable way to do that. You just have to send it and see.
I stopped asking whether JumpProof would succeed and started asking what I could learn next. Even if nobody bought a single pair, the learning alone was worth moving for.
I wasn’t all in on the outcome, I was investing in what I’d come to know on the other side.
The packing room is full. The women who’ve tested JumpProof have told us things that made us certain this matters. One tester told me she’d stopped going to group fitness classes two years ago, and now she’s back.
Now we launch, watch what happens, and learn as we go.
In the Experiment Mindset, you only fail if you stop.
If you’re sitting on your own idea right now, the question isn’t how do I back myself harder. It’s where am I actually stuck, and what’s the lever that moves it.
- Tamsin Simounds, author of The Experiment Mindset (Wiley $32.95), applies the science of human growth to how ambitious people lead, work and build careers.
